I’m going to be road tripping to Siggraph this week with some of my AM classmates. I’m really looking forward to a whole week of animation-centric goodness. In celebration, I whipped up some little info/business cards which were more in keeping with the current deign of this site and my resume to trade with folks I meet there. Here they are, freshly Xacto-ed:

So, technically I did have Chris as a mentor, but he was only my substitute mentor for one week. He impressed me with his excitement and he was really willing to dig into our shots and try to help us out even though he was only going to be mentoring us for a short time. I really appreciated it.

He’s working at Pixar right now, and he keeps a blog where he posts his sketching and gesture drawing. He also has another site with some of his older animation work on it, including his CalArts films. Since I’m not training in a 2D program I like watching those especially.

My much more athletic spouse-to-be completed the San Francisco marathon this weekend with a quite respectable time of 3:44:15. I know that has nothing to do with animation or art, but I’m just so massively impressed I felt the need to share. Yay Martin!

One of the great things about being an Animation Mentor student is getting access to working professional animators as teachers for an extended period of time. It has a downside though, and that downside is mentor envy. There simply is no way you will land a class with every teacher you want over the course of the program. AM, by making the weekly critiques of all students available, has given us the tools to stalk and learn from those mentors which we admire.

Kevin Koch makes it extra easy, because he also has a blog called Synchrolux where he chronicles his studies of filmmaking and animation. Want to see an entire movie broken down to see if good characters are on the right and bad on the left? Kevin’s got that. Want to learn about how and why humans blink? Kevin has several well researched posts on that too. Check it out!

I’m thinking of applying to the Girls Drawing Girls group. It seems like it would be a lot of fun, so to that end I sketched up this version of Poison Ivy last night. She still needs some work on the hands and a lot of cleaning, but I’m looking forward to finishing her up and getting to the coloring. Maybe I’ll draw Harley Quinn next, since the new Batman movie seems to have given me Batman on the brain.

It’s kind of like soft serve but less melty.

Finally! I have moved my entire site onto a blog platform for easier updating. I hope you like the early 2000’s ipod look I’ve got going on right now- it’s an homage to the little red Shuffle that’s been keeping me sane at life drawing class this summer (the teacher’s been playing “Phantom of the Opera” *shudder*).

Despite some of the design limitations of Wordpress, I’m pretty happy with how this site is coming along. So I’m going to go ahead and close down my blogger blog and combine everything on this site. Now that everything is set up, I should be able to keep continually improving the look of things around here, and it certainly was about time to update my portfolio. If you ever want to see some of my older work, there’s an archive links section over on your left there.